Fakebook still doesn’t have face news under control. Wait. Oh, you know what I mean.
Is that all? No, also breaking this morning, Facebook blocked a gun rights ad then unblocked it, de-activated a vast number of “right wing” accounts and pages ahead of Brazil elections, and allowed a fake interview with Democratic Congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to go viral (like views in seven figures) before it was retrospectively labeled as “satire.”
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Marketing strategies are increasingly being driven by neuroscience. At least, according to consultants at Final Mile Consulting who aim to steer decision-making by applying concepts from cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, and design. I recently attended Fractal Analytics’s ai.now workshop in New York City, which covered a wide array of topics that bridged the gap between artificial and human intelligence.
Biju Dominic, CEO, Final Mile Consulting, insisted that “the belief that emotions have universal facial fingerprints is wrong,” and stressed that understanding emotion and intent goes beyond studying initial appearances. Emotions are often unconscious, Dominic explained. To stress the importance of deciphering emotions where marketers rely on AI, Dominic used the example of anger, displaying a close-up of a man’s face on the projection screen behind him — all scrunched up, grimacing. Most in the audience agreed the image was indeed a depiction of anger.
Then, Dominic zoomed out to reveal the image was of a hockey player celebrating having just scored a winning goal. That human-like subjectivity can make or break an interpretation of reality, and can drive better outcomes for marketers who rely on technology. Human intelligence is far and away still a requirement in the equation, Dominic said. — Nick Ciccone
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Let’s do integrations:
- Qubit, the specialists in real-time personalization of the consumer experience, have been busy on the integration front, announcing partnerships with two big players — Salesforce and SAP — just days apart. Qubit’s Salesforce Commerce Cloud cartridge enables automatic integration of the Qubit data layer. Qubit’s 2.0 eCommerce personalization is now also integrated with SAP Customer Experience, bringing Qubit personalization direct to existing Hybris (now Customer Experience) users.
- Sprout Social, unlike Sprinklr, say, or even Spredfast, has always pitched to small and medium-sized businesses, as well as agencies (they do have enterprise clients too). They might be meeting a need for that client base with the addition of image-based discovery platform Pinterest to their social portfolio. The partnership will help marketers engaged with the Pinterest community to streamline publishing and reporting.
- And Cargo, the in-car commerce vendor to the Rideshare community linked arms globally with Uber. They’ll be enabling rideshare drivers to surround passengers with a cornucopia of premium products — beverages, beauty products, and even electronics — and they’ll pay commissions to the drivers too. Better than a piece of gum.
